A quick aside:

I now believe it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better (if it gets better). I’m not going to enumerate what’s been going on; you’re either paying attention or you’re not, but we’re less than one hundred days in and the lurch towards real fascism has been notable.

24 years ago, we experienced a lurch towards a surveillance state in the wake of 9/11. George W Bush, through the PATRIOT Act among other instruments, didn’t just establish new ways for people on American soil to be tracked, imprisoned, and deported, his administration also created a new set of cultural norms based on distrust and insidious militarism that have lasted to this day.

That’s one of my biggest worries about the current administration. It will end, one way or another, although talk of an unconstitutional third term is certainly worrying in itself. But Trump is old; he can’t be President forever. It’s the lingering cultural shift that will be with us for generations, long after Trump himself has left us and Musk has found his way to some other segregationist power play. It’s the impact of DOGE; the concentration camps in El Salvador; the spirit of authoritarianism and apartheid that is now being set in motion. Potentially more; we’re less than two months in to a four year term even if he doesn’t get to take a third one. This will change the country for good, and in turn, it will change the world for good. It is a continuation of Jim Crow, of apartheid, and, yes, of Nazi Germany. It isn’t the same as those, but they’re all of a one, all part of a through line that must be continually defeated.

The incentives to not speak out are enormous. One voice doesn’t change a great deal, and over time the risks to dissent grow larger. But if there are many voices, and those voices translate into peaceful protest on the streets, and they translate into other actions that democratically resist, then there is hope. What doesn’t work is downplaying the risk, saying “let’s see what happens”, or sticking your head in the sand and waiting for it all to blow over. It may not blow over. And either way, future generations will ask where you were, what you did, how you showed up when the fascists came to town.